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May 11, 2005
tiddly widdly
So I've become a convert to the latest craze that is going around the web... Getting Things Done (GTD).
The book, by David Allen, is being talked about all over the place. If you check out Technorati, you'll see that there are 335 posts from 102 blogs that match the GTD tag. Going through the del.icio.us GTD tags could take you all day. Normally I'm not a total bandwagon jumper but all those people are really onto something here.
What is it? There are lots of sites that explain how GTD works. So I'll just sum it up--it's an incredible organization system for tasks and projects.
The cool thing--it's completely changing how I work. Working in marketing, I usually have a gazillion projects with numerous tasks that are associated with those projects. Keeping track of them is a constant challenge and I always live in some fear that something is going to fall off the huge plate that I'm juggling around. No more! Well not as much anymore at least! GTD is such a smart and easy way of understanding what lies in front of you. It's a nonlinear way to organize, which is perfect for the massive multitasker. It took me a few hours to put it all together at work but now everything is so fluid it is freaky!
There are a lot of great tools popping up everywhere that are making GTD fans happy--Backpack, Airset, Trumba and others, none of them even come close to what the GTD Tiddlywiki is doing for the way I'm working. It's absolutely phenomenal. I've tweaked it all around to suit my GTD needs, changing some of the categories and the menus. One thing I am doing is creating a dump file organized by month so that once a major task is complete I can archive it so I have a list to look back on for my monthly reports. I love that it is an offline tool and that I can take it easily with me on my USB stick (i.e. WikiOnAStick). I didn't even have to install any software, which means that my IT department won't flip out.
It's a really nice feeling to be able to know exactly all the work I have in front of me. I feel more proactive and even more excited about what I'm doing than I was before. The pressure of remembering everything is gone. If you, like me, have looked into countless methods of organizaiton for your crazy worklife and have never been able to quite find something perfect--pick up this book. And yes yes yes, check out the GTD version of the TiddlyWiki. Nathan Bowers and Jeremy Ruston have drastically improved my life within the space of the two days I've been using the GTDTiddlyWiki!
Posted by crystallyn at May 11, 2005 06:01 PM